A `50s Dream Lived Out Without Any Regrets

June 08, 1986|By Robert Cross.

In Benita Eisler`s ``Private Lives,`` one of her interview subjects revealed herself as a paragon of the `50s generation, one of the few who lived out the idyll depicted on the postcard reproduced on Page 1.

Midwesterner Betts Saunders (not her real name), took one look at the picture and said, ``That`s still my ideal--a dream which I made come true.``

To begin achieving that ideal, Saunders lived a cautious childhood. ``I was always very aware of the consequences of everything you do,`` she told Eisler. ``And I was careful never, never to do anything that would harm me or damage my future.

``My mother never entertained a doubt about anything. You washed on Monday, ironed on Tuesday and stayed a virgin until you were married.``

Saunders` most vivid memory of school was dancing in the gym--after lunch, during lunch and after classes, ``jitterbug and slow dances.`` Despite that diversion, she studied hard through junior high school.

``Then when I got to high school, in 9th grade, I became breathtakingly shallow. Revlon had just come out with Cherries in the Snow lipstick. That was the high point; next came clothes and dancing.``

Saunders was popular, a homecoming queen. ``You had to have personality,`` she recalled. ``But it was personality of a very managed, created kind. We worked at it; we learned everybody`s name . . . .

``I probably had the nicest clothes, as nice as anyone`s. We wore full corduroy skirts with layers of crinoline petticoats underneath; wide elastic cinch belts and short-sleeved Ship`N Shore blouses . . . . We wore them with little scarves knotted at the neck; you had to have lots and lots of little scarves.``

Her high school ``steady`` worked in a supermarket and showed no interest in attending college. Because his lack of ambition threatened to mar her vision of the future, Saunders dumped him. ``My friends thought I was crazy. Everyone said, `My God, his car`s so neat.` It was a red and white `53 Chevy.``

After graduating from a state university in 1961, she signed on as an assistant kindergarten teacher and met a young medical student named Sam. They married the following June.

Following her husband`s internship in San Francisco, they returned to the Midwest and began raising the first of their four children in a new housing development.

``We did lots of entertaining because as young medical families, we didn`t have the money to go out,`` Saunders remembered. ``The salaries were pitiful. But a mistake we all made was to have children right away. So you had to entertain in a way that allowed for bringing children. Nobody could afford sitters. We had potluck suppers . . . . And in warm weather, it was always backyard barbecue.``

Sam went off to Vietnam. He returned early in the war with his residency completed and a practice and professorship in orthopedic surgery awaiting him. The years of prosperity began.

``We raised our children so 1950s,`` Saunders said. ``Since they were babies, they`ve gone everywhere with us. We`ve taken them to fine restaurants. We`ve flown with them. We`ve never gone on a trip without the kids in the back of the car.``

Sam proved to be a devoted and loving father. He shared 50 percent of the child-rearing responsibility and made time for all of his family`s activities. But, like so many `50s men, he was reluctant to express his feelings verbally. One day, during a long bout with the flu, Saunders stood in front of the mirror, wearing her bathrobe, and said to her husband, ``I don`t know how you stand it. You work like a dog all day. You come home and I look awful. The house is a mess. There`s no food in the fridge. I wouldn`t blame you for taking up with one of those cute nurses who are always all over you.``

Sam Saunders was deeply offended. His morality had been called into question. However, he could not bring himself to say what Saunders wanted to hear: ``Darling, I love you so much, I don`t care how awful you look. I would never do that, because you`re No. 1 in my life.``

She has never doubted her husband`s feelings for her, but Saunders regrets that he has not been able to put them into words. When he sent her a bouquet of Valentine`s Day roses, he signed the card ``your secret admirer.`` Author Benita Eisler encountered several women who came of age in the

`50s and who rejected Betts Saunders` version of happiness. Some outgrew the restrictive roles allotted to them in their decade. Some came to recognize the cruel ironies in teenage fantasies that depended upon finding the perfect man. Betts Saunders just happened to find one.

``She is not the enemy my feminist friends envision,`` Eisler writes.

``She is the Trojan horse of our generation--hundreds of thousands of Betts Saunders who do not consider being wives and mothers as roles but as what they are. The system worked for them. But smart women like Betts Saunders know it worked because the men they married did not leave them holding the bag, turning them into a front for a happy family life . . . Happy families, Leo Tolstoy wrote, are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. . . . (Betts Saunders) knows it worked because of the part that no one can write in; the reason why she describes her life as even better than she thought it would be, the reason why Tolstoy found all happy families to be all the same: alike in the accidental grace of enduring love.``